iulie 22, 2012

quantum discontinuity

'All too often,when we look back in time, we discover that much of
what we thought science turned out to be myth after all. To use the word
with something like neutrality, we could say that a myth is a
structured world of perception and experience which can be observed
externally; it is an inhabited world of meaning, a system of
representations, however loosely organized. In which case, we might well
be inhabiting a myth ourselves, but because our myth appears to us to
be no more than a transparency onto the fabric of reality, we perceive
it as science rather than myth. We cannot then see it externally; our
structure of thought and the realities it perceives are connected by a
transparent filament, invisible to our own eyes. Once such a
transparency is superseded, once we can see how seemingly neutral
scientific perception was in fact implicated in a set of cultural
assumptions, structured if not necessarily contaminated by the fictions
of the time, then we can start to make out the lineaments of a myth.
We do not have to travel back far in time to see such operations at
work. For example, positivism in the second half of the nineteenth
century regarded itself as the least mythic form of thought that had
ever existed.'